Easy Technology for Marketing Your House

In this interview, Amber Carrillo discusses with Kevin Price and Alison Reeves the best types of technology for marketing real estate. If you are trying to sell your house fast on your own, these resources will be great in getting your property found.

Kevin Price

Welcome back to the Monday edition of The Price of Business. I am your host, Kevin Price, talking to you about you and your business. You know, one of the things we like to talk about on Mondays, we bring in our—our good friend, Brian Spitz, from Big State house deals, but today we have the good fortunate of having Alison Reeves, who works with Brian over there and—sitting in for Brian, who I think was on vacation. Delighted to get you on here. Somebody as busy as Brian needs that time. How are you?

Absolutely. BigStateHomeBuyers.com, phenomenal site. Great place not only for people who are trying to find investment deals, which they have a great investment link that you want to hit that to see some potential deals, but also a great place for individuals to go to when they’re dealing with distressed properties. And want to encourage you to check that out, BigStateHomeBuyers.com.

You’ve got a guest. She’s been on before. She looks familiar. Why don’t you re-introduce her and tell us about our topics this morning.

Alison Reeves

Yeah. Today we have Amber Carrillo from CarringtonRealEstate.com is back this morning. And she’s been in the real estate business for 10 years. And so she has really seen the market go through several phases. She knows a lot about what’s happening now.

And when I was reading her blog a couple weeks ago, I noticed a really great post geared towards people who are wanting to sell their houses. And it deals—well, the top—the topic—the title of it is called—something along the lines of needing to market your house or five tips to sell your house fast. And I see a lot of posts out there on how to sell your house fast, but this post was really unique because it dealt more with modern technology and using the tools that are at our fingertips to market your own property. And so, Amber, can you tell us more about that?

Amber Carrillo

Absolutely. The title of the blog was What Are the Five Keys to Faster Home Sales?

Kevin Price

Okay.

Amber Carrillo

And so, you know, it’s widely known there—or it should be, rather, that there are five keys that help you to sell your home faster. And of those, can you guess what number one always is?

Kevin Price

Price.

Amber Carrillo

You got it. That’s right. So you want to start out—when you are trying to sell your home—by pricing your property well. How do you do that? You can go through different mediums. Contact an educated realtor or professional that’s in the business that can pull those records for you from either the MLS or from the history of the tax records. You can hire a licensed appraiser, which will cost you, you know, 3- to 400 dollars, but if you’re trying to sell on your own, that’s something that the money—it’s well worth it.

Kevin Price

Yeah. Very good. Very good. So—you know, but people need to be smart. They always need to factor in how much of a—of a profit they want to make in that. So they got to be careful in how—how low they price it unless they really got to just get rid of it and it’s just a burden to hold on.

Amber Carrillo

Right. Absolutely. And that’s why it’s just so important to look at the historical data, as far as what is selling in your neighborhood. And you want to stay within the last six months and—to be able to come to the perfect selling price for your property.

And make sure that you’re stepping back and you are able to disconnect from any emotional attachment—attachments that you may have to that property and really look at it with the eye of a buyer that would be coming in, wanting to get a good deal in this market.

Kevin Price

Very good, Amber—I mean—Amber/Alison. You guys are going to have to change your names. You know, it’s early for this. Anyway, go ahead, Alison. You got a question, I’m sure.

Alison Reeves

Yeah. Sure. So what was the next key that—I know one of the things on the—we don’t need to discuss all five keys, but one of the things that Amber really specializes in—I think she’s known in her office as the techie queen, because she knows a lot about the best technology for doing these different things.

So what—what’s one of your most recommended technology resources for marketing your home?

Amber Carrillo

Oh, wow. There’s a wealth of technology available out on the market today. Whatever operating system you’re using, you can basically do everything to market your home directly from your phone. I am an iPhone junkie. I’m just—you know, I love the Apple systems. So there’s different apps to use for photography, for video. Some of my favorite—actually your camera just on your iPhone takes excellent photos, as you know.

Alison Reeves

Yeah.

Amber Carrillo

But there’s different apps that you can use to go in and to edit those photos. One of my favorite is Snapseed. Very simple to use. You can literally go in there and click on an area and highlight it, darken it, contrast it.

The biggest thing is when people are on the Internet looking for their new home, what’s going to attract them is, you know, beautiful photos. So you want to highlight, you know, the—the positive aspects of your property. And you want to make the colors bright, make it pop and make it attractive to attract the—just attract the eyes.

Alison Reeves

Right. And the other thing to note—I actually use Snapseed as well and the other thing to note about that app is not only can you use it for Internet quality photos, but the resolution’s actually high enough to use for print as well. So if you need to print a flier for your property, you can actually use those photos from your iPhone.

Amber Carrillo

Right.

Amber Carrillo

And also, you want to make sure that you are taking photos of your property with the best lighting conditions. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of the LightTrac. There’s an app called LightTrac. And, you know, it costs 4 or 5 bucks, but—you know—if you’re taking a lot of photos, it’s worth it, especially for real estate professionals. And it will actually tell you—you can plug in the address of the property and it will tell you the best time of day to go out and take photos.

Alison Reeves

Oh, that’s great.

Kevin Price

Wow.

Amber Carrillo

Yeah.

Kevin Price

That’s cool.

Amber Carrillo

Yeah.

Kevin Price

So—yeah. Except you have to come back to take the photos then.

Amber Carrillo

Yeah. Exactly. You want to do it before you leave—before you set up an appointment.

Kevin Price

The next thing will be to set it up with an app where you can just leave it there all day and it will automatically take the photo when it—yeah, that’s good. So then you’ll have an app that—a security app to protect the phone where like it blows up if someone steal it so it gets—it gets complicated after a while, but—but, you know, there’s an app for that somewhere.

Amber Carrillo

Yeah.

Kevin Price

But that is awesome. And technology has really dramatically transformed the whole real estate process, hasn’t it?

Amber Carrillo

It has. It has. And actually, you know, NAR put out a study in January that 9 out of 10 home buyers are starting their search on the Internet. So you want to make sure that you’re doing all that you can to advertise your property, to get it out there, to get the most traffic possible.

And I can tell you one of the ways—it’s kind of become the way of the world—is posting videos of your property on YouTube. So there’s a lot of different apps that you can use for that. One of them is called Videolicious. You can actually talk over the video that you’re recording and you walk the home buyer right through your house just like you would do a personal tour.

Reeaaaarr! You know, make it a little more authentic. You know what I mean.

Amber Carrillo

Right. Yes. And then there’s also an app that I love called Animoto which creates this beautiful slide show complete with background animation, music, you name it.

And then the one other one that I really adore is called Pitch. And it’s kind of a video and social media platform combined. And you can share your videos, you can go and like and comment and stuff on other people’s videos. But the thing about that, you can also take that and you can e-mail that out to your sellers, to potential buyers, you can post it up on YouTube and advertise it that way. And it will get a lot of hits.

Alison Reeves

Oh, that’s great. I didn’t know about that one.

Kevin Price

Do want to mention real quick CarringtonRealEstate.com. That’s C-A-R-R-I-N-G-T-O-N RealEstate.com. Our guests, Alison Reeves, and she of course, with BigStateHomeBuyers.com, and Amber Carrillo with Carrington. Good to see you both again. And always fun to get an update as to what’s going on out there. I appreciate your insights.

Alison Reeves

Absolutely.

Kevin Price

And by the way, where is that article at? Where—where can people find that?

Alison Reeves

It will be on BigStateHomeBuyers.com. And we’re also going to link to some of the other original articles on CarringtonRealEstate.com.

Kevin Price

Yeah. I hope you put it on PriceofBusiness.com too.

Alison Reeves

It will also be on The Price of Business.

Kevin Price

That will—that will be awesome. All right. Great spending time with both of these ladies and learning more about what’s happening in the very exciting real estate front here in the Houston market. Houston does better than the rest of the country in virtually every area from a business perspective, but particularly real estate. So it’s great to have people like yourselves to help us harness that and leverage that to our advantage.

Amber Carrillo

Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Alison Reeves

Thank you.

Kevin Price

All right. When we come back, we’re going to have much for you. Do want to remind you the best content here shows up over there at USDailyReview.com. You’re listening to The Price of Business.

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